CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Blue Origin’s upcoming heavy-lift New Glenn rocket will have to wait at least another year for its Florida debut, according to recent comments by an executive later confirmed by the company itself, according to News 6 partner Florida Today.
Speaking Tuesday during the Satellite 2022 conference in Washington, D.C., Blue Origin’s senior vice president of the New Glenn program, Jarrett Jones, said the rocket would not fly from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station before the end of this year as previously planned. Details on a new timeframe were not offered, News 6 partner Florida Today reported.
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A Blue Origin spokesperson later confirmed Jones’ comments and said the 322-foot rocket recently completed a design review but will not be ready in time to fly from Launch Complex 36 this year.
“After completing our final design review and getting our agreements with our current customers, it won’t be the end of this year,” the spokesperson said. “We’re communicating on a new date with our customers.”
The new timeframe being relayed to New Glenn customers was not made available.
“We will fly when we’re ready,” the spokesperson said.
The rocket was originally slated to fly in 2020 and then delayed to late 2021. Early last year, Blue said it was pushing to the end of 2022.
New Glenn is the massive rocket Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos sees as the vehicle that will help his company develop a “road to space.” Ultimately, Bezos envisions a future in which harmful activities like manufacturing are moved to orbit, leaving Earth as a place to live and less for heavy industry.
The company has spent more than $1 billion on its facility at Launch Complex 36, a pad originally built in the 1960s for Atlas-Centaur rockets. Blue Origin took over in 2015 and has more or less built an entirely new launch complex complete with the tallest water tower in the world.
Blue also operates a massive multi-building rocket factory just outside the main gates of Kennedy Space Center in an area known as Exploration Park. Not only is the New Glenn rocket being built there, but mission control for future missions will be handled out of the main building’s top floor.
In the meantime, Blue plans on flying its smaller, tourism-focused New Shepard rocket from its facility in Texas. The company has launched three missions with a total of 14 tourists so far; another flight is planned for no earlier than the morning of Tuesday, March 29, with six more passengers.